Searching the Past to Understand the Future

After the Flood

01/09/2011

I didn't so much feel like putting together an AtF post today. However, I did manage to read a rather long paper from the NCSE evaluating whether the Creationist accounts of the flood are even remotely possible and if the Ark could have actually survived with two of every animal and an extra dozen or so of all the clean animals.

Spoiler warning: no. Not it couldn't have.

The article is long, but it's fascinating, as it attempts to explain what the Earth would look like if it were suddenly ovewhelmed by flood waters, what it would look like afterwards, and what life on the Ark would be like (spoiler warning: pitch black, stinky, and potentially explosive).

If you don't feel like reading it, there are a couple of things I really liked.

1. It is pointed out that Noah covered the Ark with pitch. But in Creationism there couldn't have possibly been pitch, since it was the immense pressure of the waters of the flood that created oil and whatnot.[1]

2. Even given rather generous specifications in terms of available space and numbers of animals, the Ark would have had 0.275 cubic feet of space for each animal. Consider the elephant. Or the rhinoceros. Or the horse. Or, hell, the tiny dogs Hollywood starlets are prone to carry around in purses. That space disappears quickly...

3. The article refers to people who engage in Noahic apologetics as "arkeologists."

4. This quote: But merely to pose such questions is to answer them, for the creationists already "know" what occurred and seek only to confirm it. As Henry Morris concludes, "But the main reason for insisting on the universal flood as a fact of history and as the primary vehicle for geological interpretation is that God's word plainly teaches it! No geologic difficulties, real or imagined, can be allowed to take precedence over the clear statements and necessary inference of Scripture" (1970, p. 33).

5. And also this quote: When even these nonsensical suggestions fail, the apologists have no qualms about resorting to the interpretive wastebasket: miracles.

6. Also, this quote: This includes so many pointless prodigies, so many inane interventions for no reason other than to save a literalistic Bible, that religion itself is cheapened in the process, not to mention the total abandonment of any semblance of science.

Ah, hell, just go read the damn thing. It's totally worthwhile.

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[1]This is actually one of those places where the old saying "god is in the details" can come in to rather ironic play. There are all of these massive impossibilites that just kind of slide past one after another. Then you hit a tiny little point where you stop and think, "Well, shit, I never thought of that before."

Scalzi had one of those moments in a post I linked to right before Christmas. The innkeeper points out that it's a little screwy that Joseph had just returned to his hometown but couldn't find anyone from his family to stay with. At that point all of the big arguments that there was no massive census called by Augustine and that no Roman administrator in his right mind would call for such a boneheaded, insanely difficult method of running a census collapse and the easy to point out question becomes, "If Joseph was home, why couldn't he stay with a family member?"

11/22/2010

So I’m beginning to notice a disturbing trend in the creation of these AtF posts. Every time I go to Bill Cooper’s master work on, um, whatever it is he’s arguing, I find myself wincing, as if I was just hit in the face with a giant fist made of stupidity. Also, the stupid smells like poop. And it yells at me in the manner of, say, an ex-girlfriend who liked yelling and never got anything right. This seems, to me, a negative development.[1]

Either way, there’s a lot of weird and pointless bullshit in this one. We’re having more “fun” with genealogies. But it’s okay, since I’m on the tail-end of an unexpected three-day weekend[2] and I only have a three-ish day week ahead of me. So that’s awesome.

Also, there’s a bit of a conversation that must be had here. Well, it doesn’t have to be had. But it’s far more interesting than going farther with ol’ Capt. Cooper. So we’re going to have it.

But let’s be clear: history, like science, values currency. You may go back to the stacks to find sources who were close to the action, but ultimately you turn to the latest journals to help you interpret those sources. The fact is that Beck tends to drag up ideas and authors that well deserve to be in the dustbin of history.

It pains me to say this, but I always mistrust those people who emphasis the obscurity of their sources, or how much time they spent in the archives. Do you know who said, “I’ve been to the archives, where the truth is”? Holocaust denier David Irving, which explains why I don’t have it on a t-shirt.

This was part of an anti-Glenn Beck screed, but it works pretty well for my purposes here, too.

See, this entire time Bill Cooper has been claiming a specific sort of gnosis. He’s been going back to really old historical documents and claiming that they tell a story that us horrible modernists don’t want anyone to hear. I have no truck with Nennius because I know that history is not what he believes it to be. Bill Cooper thinks I have no truck with him because I want to disregard Biblical truth. His entire historical schema, then, makes him a conspiracy theorist, trying to enlighten everyone to the truth that every single historian for the past several centuries has been trying to cover up the obvious truth that the world is only six thousand years ago and England was really originally captured from the giants by the descendant of a guy who appeared in Homer’s Illiad. And all of this is in service of the central goal of proving that the Biblical genealogies in Genesis are accurate.[4]

In order to do this you have to go back to the archives for discredited sources. The lack of an actual Adam and Eve in an actual Garden of Eden is not so much a modernist belief as an established scientific and historical fact. Those of us who read history and study history cannot get around it. The problem, of course, is that this has not always been the established belief or fact that we currently take for granted. I do not hold it against Nennius that he believed in Brutus of Troy and all that jazz and, therefore, wrote about it as if it happened.

Go back to Prester John. It is my firm belief that we cannot fully comprehend large chunks of Medieval European history and the Age of Discovery without knowing that the Europeans believed in Prester John and his invincible army.[5] We just can’t.

In short: Nennius didn’t know any better. I can’t fault him for that. Cooper should know better. And I feel like I’ve made this point a time or twelve…

Anyway, the last time we were here, Cooper was Godwining himself by claiming that the Anglo-Saxon genealogies had to be true because they went back to an ancient Jewish book and the Germans have always been anti-Semitic, even before the Nazis, so that if it wasn’t true they wouldn’t have written it down.[6] I’ve already called this the dumbest argument ever, based entirely on the fact that marauding bands of Anglo-Saxons probably didn’t know what a Jew was or why they should be hated (hint: pagans probably don’t give a shit about who killed the Christian lord and savior or why they did so…). Throughout this little project we’ve been treated to such wacky and wonderful asides. It’s a disconnected collection of bizarre historical bullshittery, but the reason for this is simple: he has no other way of backing up his arguments.

See, this is the craziest thing about it all: if you want to actively believe in the world according to Bill Cooper the only way you can do it is by going and grabbing the dustiest tomes from the furthest shelves at the back of the stacks. And you then have to take the more recent academic work completely out of context. This is why we’re seeing one sentence at a time from various people who dare to point out the problems in the whole hypothesis. Our good buddy Kenneth Sisam, who pointed out that the royal genealogy from Wessex was stolen from elsewhere is the next one to get this treatment.

Cooper is still arguing against Lapidge and Keynes, who claimed that a Seth had been changed to a Shem because the Anglo-Saxons were trying to connect themselves to Jesus. This totally doesn’t work for Cooper, and he thinks Sisam provides the solution to the problem. How does this work? Why quote mining, of course. To wit:

The question, surprisingly enough, is answered in part by one of the more skeptical investigators of modem times, Sisam, who, when dealing with the identities of Seth and Sceaf, is forced to admit that: “Iafeth [i.e. Japheth] was usually regarded as the ancestor of the European peoples, and the possibility that the last four letters of his name have something to do with the error Seth cannot be excluded.”

This says precisely nothing. All it indicates is that Sisam was open-minded enough to believe that the scribes made an honest mistake somewhere and that anyone who made too much of a Seth/Shem confusion was running down a rabbit trail. Sisam may well have been right, too, as Cooper then points out.

To further the identity of Asser's Seth with the Sceaf of other chronicles, we have the testimony of Florence of Worcester, who wrote in AD 1118 that, 'Seth Saxonice Sceaf,'--and in another of his manuscripts the name of Sceaf--is written over an erasure of the name Seth by a later scribe.

Hey, that shit happens. It creates a palimpsest, which is one of my favorite words of all time. Basically, if something is written, then erased, then written over again the thing on the bottom that can still be kinda seen is a palimpsest. A lot of our understanding of history is actually based on palimpsests, as writing materials were expensive and the old was often just scraped off and written over. Studying history can be complicated like that. But it creates awesome words.

Then we have an interesting moment.

But after his eminently sensible observation, Sisam then went on to create problems of his own, for having written an extremely involved and in-depth study of the Anglo-Saxon royal genealogies, when it came to the lists of the various biblical patriarchs whose names appear in the earliest parts of those same pedigrees, he dismissed them thus: "The Biblical names show the artificial character of this lengthened pedigree and the crudeness of the connexions lacked muster. Otherwise they need not detain us."

I’m not entirely sure how Sisam’s words in this case can be considered a “problem.” Again, since I’m dealing with some terribly annoying quote-mining I have to make some assumptions. But my assumption is that Sisam built up is “extremely involved and in-depth study” precisely in order to say that the Anglo-Saxon royal genealogies were a load of bollocks and could, therefore, be ignored from here on out.

This is, unfortunately, a deeply important part of history. The historian spends an awful lot of time working on stuff that ultimately doesn’t matter precisely to explain why it does not matter. It’s a variety of historiography. It says, “We used to believe [this], but closer research indicates that [this] is a silly, silly thing to believe. So let us look at it a different way.”

And if you’re Kenneth Sisam, you then go on to argue for the Sisam Hypothesis. Your hypothesis then becomes the basis for all understanding of how the genealogy of Wessex was created. That’s a lot more than Bill Cooper can say, as I don’t believe there’s anyone out there arguing for the Cooper Hypothesis.[7]

Cooper kinda misses this point, though, and claims that Sisam has somehow failed by having to drop everything and claim that “[b]eyond Cerdic, all is fiction or error, and if the names themselves are old, they were not attached to the ancestry of the West Saxon kings by old tradition.” This is, of course, the exact basis of the Sisam Hypothesis. And, again, it is the Sisam Hypothesis that currently holds sway, mostly because it holds the greatest explanatory power for why the genealogy of Wessex is what it is.

Cooper doesn’t much like this. But he fights against it by…well, just read:

We could ask what they were attached by if not by old tradition, although it is more to our purpose to consider that Sisam recognised that one part of the Saxon genealogy depends very much upon the other. If one section collapses, then so do the others.

If anyone wants to receive an education on how to be both smug and wrong at the same time, I’d suggest starting with those two sentences and working from there. See, the first part about what the names were attached by is answered by honestly approaching the work of Sisam. Sisam’s Hypothesis then explains the rest of it. Cooper either misses that one completely or is really hoping that his readers do.

I, for one, have not…

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[1]Although, really, we’re talking about stupidity that is capable of creating a corporeal form, developing a scent, and speech. So that’s some pretty impressive stupidity. Really, the stupidity itself is probably smarter than the book which I’m intending for it to represent. Which is kinda weird, when you think about it.

[2]So you know you’re going through a really shitty spell at work when you wake up every morning thinking, “I should really call in sick today.” On Thursday I walked in to the office, read my first email of the day and immediately set up a PTO day for Friday. I was incapable of handling a Friday. Even my mutant half-day Fridays.

It was kind of awesome, too. I basically pulled an Office Space and got out of bed at about noon. Then I played StarCraft for the first time. Look at that again. I played StarCraft for the first time. Not StarCraft II. StarCraft. See, I’d bought a copy a few years ago and never got around to playing it because by then I was pretty meh on the entire RTS thing. I’d played Warcraft II and Age of Empires III a lot and I was hitting a point where they were all really repetitive. But I actually really wanted to try out StarCraft II, so I figured it was probably about time to play StarCraft itself. I got, like, five or six missions in, the game froze up, and I was like, “Meh. Now I remember why I stopped playing traditional RTSes.”

So yesterday and today I broke out Medieval II: Total War for the first time in nearly a year. I have two words: fucking Mongols. Seriously. And I’m playing as Constantinople, so when the Timurids inevitably show up with their elephants what have cannon on top I’ll be screwed. Elephants. With cannon. And the Byzantines don’t get gunpowder units. The only real advantage they have is that there is a wide range of horse archers, so I can at least keep the Mongols off my flanks way better than I could in past iterations when I only had traditional lancer cavalry…

Also, the historical inaccuracy of the Total War games is kinda fun. Like, the Mongols show up with things that are basically Hwacha. The only problem with this is that the Hwacha was Korean. And it came around about 400 years after the Mongols. So there were two problems. Now, rumor has it that there were, in fact, Mughal[3] rulers who used elephant-mounted cannon. But I don’t think Tamerlane had them.

Also, has anyone other than me noticed that I keep trying to make these AtF posts less and less about After the Flood? It’s almost like I have some sort of weird aversion to the topic or something…

[3]I think. Funny Total War story: when you get up to Empire: Total War the various powers on the Indian subcontinent still use elephants. They’re really easy to take out. Seriously. A single line infantry regiment can mess that shit up. It’s either a fascinating commentary on the tremendous effect that quality gunpowder arms had on the world of war by the 18th Century or a sad commentary on the poor manufacturing standards in Indian elephant factories in the years leading to the colonial takeover by the British.

Also, I keep delaying the purchase of Napoleon: Total War. Not sure why. Probably because I have a lot of other things to do at any given time. Also, you don’t care.

[4]I’ve never really thought about this before, but the whole Brutus/Aeneas connection is kinda fuck stupid. I mean, what does a Greek poem which lead to a Roman poem have to do with Jewish history? Actually, now that I think about it, I probably have thought of this before, but it probably got mixed up in the caustic soup that is the rest of this fuck stupid. So I’ll digress…

[5]I had The Habitation of the Blessed sitting on my desk at work and one of my co-workers asked about it. This allowed me to expound upon Prester John for a bit. His response was basically, “So why is it that we never get taught about this sort of thing in school?” I honestly wish there were a good reason for that beyond, y’know, time, funding, and teacher engagement. I can say without much reservation that the most important books I’ve read in re: understanding how history works were The Fourth Part of the World, Over the Edge of the World, and The Measure of All Things. Why? Because all three books started off by talking about what the world looked like before this one momentous event/discovery/journey that changed everything. It was in reading those three books that I was able to fully comprehend how much we take for granted in terms of basic knowledge. Truly, we stand on the shoulders of giants. The problem with that is we forget that we have a better vantage point from our higher position.

[6]Since I already discussed Glenn Beck: what’s with the, “This has to be true because it cannot possibly be a lie,” defense? I mean, Beck claimed that his complete and total smear job of George Soros had to be true because he was on TV and no one can lie on TV. Cooper claims that the Anglo-Saxons were telling the truth because it was against their laws to lie. But what if it’s Opposite Day or the scribe that wrote down the genealogies was doing it with his fingers, toes, and shoelaces crossed? What then?

[7]Unless it’s Sheldon Cooper. And the hypothesis has something to do with roommates or annoying blondes who live across the hall. Or maybe detecting sarcasm.

11/15/2010

So I was in the process of trying to figure out where I'd left off with my last AtF last night when I got up to do some laundry. When I came back the little "you have no internet!" indicator was on. This happens. I have an old DSL Router that was built by Motorola, so you just know it barely works. This time around, though, it turns out that it had stopped working completely. Which is awesome.

Also, it's time for today's trivia: what electronics stores are open after 6 pm on a Sunday? The answer? None of them.

It was kind of nice, though. I ended up getting a bunch of crap done that needed to get done. And then I was ready to go to bed at about 10, which is just crazy. It also meant that I was able to get some reading in.

I may well have to engage in some discussion of The Habitation of the Blessed one of these days. Fascinating mythmaking, that. It's also deeply interesting because I'm actually somewhat lost, but I know that if I didn't have an idea of the Medieval European view of the cosmos I'd be completely lost. Valente introduces these strange and wondrous characters with bizarre bodies and ideas without going for the standard fantasy/sci-fi exposition. I actually think that's wonderful, as I love the idea of actually forcing the writer to try to imagine what's going on and develop a mental image of this world that's being introduced.

But, by the same token, it can be really confusing. So this is where my background knowledge of the world that was imagined in the past is useful. It's also deeply, deeply fascinating to realize that these strange and crazy things really did exist, at least in the imaginations of Europeans in a world before Google Maps...

Anyway, that's my Sunday.

Also, having looked through where I was in AtF and gotten at least an idea of what's next, I'm considering re-working my strategy. It seems like we're getting more and more Arguments by Assertion from Cooper, especially where genealogy is concerned. There are only so many interesting ways he can say, "These genealogies have to be real because otherwise someone would have gotten in trouble." There are also only so many ways I can say, "Yeah. Right. As if."

So I'm probably going to take more of a hunt and peck approach from here on out. I think we all get that Cooper's an idiot and he's just trying to build a great, groaning pile of absurd assertions to prove to himself and his imagined audience that his beliefs aren't completely absurd.

10/31/2010

Aight, so I’ve got a little side project I haven’t gotten around to, so I don’t have much time for AtF. Still, I haven’t really done one the last couple weeks and I’m not expecting to be able to get to it next week, either. So I feel compelled to do something.

Fortunately, my world has recently been rocked by sad, tragic, and crazy news.

See, it turns out I might not actually be quite as Norwegian as I’ve always been told. I might not even be Norwegian.

I’ll let that sink in for a moment. I’m assuming it will be as difficult for you to take as it was for me. You ready to go on? Good.

So here’s what happened:

There was a man. His name, as I recall, was Ned. He came over to America from the Old Country with his wife. Ned and his wife then had children. Their children had children. One of those children was my grandmother. My grandmother married a Swede, so the general theory was that my mother was half Norwegian and half Swedish.

My cousin gave my mother a book of local history for her birthday. Why there exists in this world a book of local history for a town in Minnesota that aspires to be a dot on the map is completely and totally beyond me. But that’s how it goes.

In this book of local history my mother learned that ol’ Ned’s wife didn’t actually make it to America. He had a second wife. Who might have been Swedish. This actually explains a lot.

See, my grandmother knew a lot of Norwegian. She’s not fluent by any stretch of the imagination, but she picked up words and phrases and terms. She has a friend who is fluent in Norwegian. He’s told her that she doesn’t actually know Norwegian.

So we’re talking genealogy, here. We’re talking a screwed up genealogy. And we’re talking about a genealogy from which I am only four generations removed. We can also assume that, even if my particular ancestors weren’t particularly literate, they came from a society which was.

However, my family relies on oral tradition. Nobody’s ever written the stories down. Nobody’s ever traced the family tree on paper. Something got lost in the not-so-distant past. And, as it turns out, that means that it’s entirely possible that I’m not even Norwegian.

For my purposes, that’s not really a big deal. But pretend, for just a moment, that I was a claimant to the throne of Norway. Now, all of the sudden, that makes a world of difference.

I don’t have to explain why this relates to AtF. Unfortunately, Bill Cooper would probably ignore it, because, hey, my family history ain’t the Bible.

10/25/2010

So I'd totally been intending to do an AtF. There was a Peacemakers show in Plano, but it was supposed to be over by eight, so I was going to head home afterwards and write it. I had a plan and everything.

The show ended about when expected. But then I ended up heading down the street to have a beer with a certain individual who claims to be a false similacrum of a former Vice President. Then I remembered I hadn't done any grocery shopping and I had an empty fridge.

10/03/2010

Two weeks really weren’t enough. I mean, I thought that a Sunday evening lost in the crazy world of Civ V would cause me to forget just how infuriatingly stupid After the Flood is. I thought maybe, just maybe, it would look different in Windows 7 than Windows Vista.[1]

No such luck, sadly. So I guess there’s no choice but to get in to it. Although I am completely and totally sober right now. So I’ve got that goin’ against me.

If you remember from our last episode I was getting increasingly pissed about Bill Cooper’s inability to actually handle dealing with people who disagree with his stupid assertions in any way, shaper, or form that’s even remotely intellectually honest. The bad news is that it gets even worse this time around. The good news is that…um…well, I’ve gotten to watch Bears games on national TV three weeks in a row and I’ll be back in Chicago the next two Sundays. Therefore I totally feel good about not shelling out for DirecTV’s NFL Sunday Ticket. So that’s five guaranteed games. And they’ve got another Monday Night Football game against the Packers towards the end of the season. I also figure there’s a fifty-fifty shot I’ll get one or both of the games against either the Pats or the Jets towards the end of the season, too. I might get the week 7 game against the Redskins, too, as the Cowboys are playing MNF against the Giants that week and the Redskins are a division rival.

It’s the little things that get me through the week…

Of course as I write this the Bears are sucking much worse than the commercial for Jackass 3-D. Fortunately, though, the New York Football Giants seem to be doing their level-headed best to keep the Bears in the game while keeping Jay Cutler on his back. And I’ve managed to write a half-page without actually touching on After the Flood.

Anyway, I was on FP Magoun and my questions as to whether anything Cooper said about him was even remotely viable. This was a somewhat difficult task, as the work of FP Magoun isn’t exactly widely available.[2] However, after the third attempt to look at this I finally figured out what the hell is going on here. Strangely, it’s not quite as convoluted or bed-crappingly terrible as I’d thought. The key is this:

After Noah, Asser's list bears no resemblance whatever to that of Luke, and if Magoun is suggesting that by virtue of Aethelwulf's descent from Noah, Aethelwulf is thus made a collateral relative of Our Lord, then Magoun has clearly not considered the fact that as all men are descended from Noah, then the royal Aethelwulf would have been no better than the common man! A regal contradiction if ever there was one. Surely, if, as Magoun suggests, Aethelwulf had truly wished to be seen as a blood-relative of Christ, then he would have concocted a list that went back to the royal house of David, from whom Jesus was descended through His mother. But nothing of the kind is offered. Rather, Aethelwulf's line is traced through that of kings who were notorious in the early annals for their paganism, and Magoun's charge, so often quoted and so revered in modernist circles, falls flat on its proverbial face. The genealogy runs counter to all that is alleged against it.

Part of this is an overlap from a quote I used two weeks ago.

Basically what’s happened is this. FP Magoun was trying to argue that Aethelwulf was trying to trace his genealogy back to Jesus. Either that or FP Magoun was arguing that Aethelwulf was actually descended from Jesus. I guess it depends on whether Magoun was a real historian or a nut. For the moment I’ll assume the former, as I haven’t gotten any real sense that Magoun deserves to have his name dragged through the mud.[3]

Last time around the way I read it I thought Cooper was basically destroying his own arguments in arguing against Magoun. What I realize now is that he was doing nothing of the sort. The genealogy of Jesus in Luke doesn’t necessarily have to be a direct line from Aethelwulf to Noah. So it’s possible that Cooper was right in taking Magoun to task. Of course we don’t actually have any way of judging that, as my realization of what the argument really was doesn’t change the fact that Cooper did a terrible job of representing Magoun’s arguments. Which is an inherent part of the problem.

Either way, I’m forced to say that Cooper did not, in fact, negate his own argument. That doesn’t mean things aren’t about to get even stupider, though. No sirree.

Yet that is not the end of the folly, for Keynes and Lapidge propose the most astonishing notion of all, and it is one which draws our attention to the name of Sceaf on our genealogy, (pronounced 'sheaf' or 'shaif'). Making the most of the fact that Asser allegedly misspelt Sceaf's name as Seth in the royal genealogy, they blandly inform their readers that:

That’s just a dick move right there. I mean, we were just introduced to Keynes and Lapidge, like, two seconds ago. As far as I know this “Keynes” may well be John Maynard Keynes, whose economic philosophies saved our asses from the Great Depression and which could be saving us right now if we didn’t have an entire planet that’s doing it’s level-headed best to pretend like absolutely nothing of economic note happened between 1929 and 1941. And since Cooper continues his inexplicable misuse of endnotes in this chapter, I can’t prove it’s not James Maynard Keynes because I’d have to go to the bibliography, which is a lot of work. And, dammit, I want to get this done with so I can make my lunch for tomorrow, shave, watch Veronica Mars,[4] and go to bed.

Anyway, this is the “bland” quote:

Towards the end of the genealogy, Asser's "Seth", son of Noah, corresponds to Sem (i.e. Shem) of Luke iii...

If anyone can tell me why that needs to be singled out as “bland,” I’d love to know. Also, if anyone can tell me why I’d be annoyed to get this sentence fragment as the entirety of the quote, I’ll give you a(n internet) cookie.

In other words, Keynes and Lapidge are attempting the same thing as Magoun, (and they were aware of Magoun's paper for they cite it), by trying to tie in the Saxon genealogies with those of the New Testament, namely the gospel of Luke, so that the wearisome charge of 'pious fraud' could again be made.

Yes, that “wearisome charge.” Really, it’s good that Cooper doesn’t have any particularly wearisome hobby horse on which he rides across the pages of this book. Like, let’s say that he found it necessary to level charges against horrible “modernist” scholars attempting to destroy the truth that any right-thinking, Bible-believing historian should know to be the case over the course of every other paragraph. That would have just made this book excruciating. Bland, also. Too.

Anyway, we now get the Dumbest. Fucking. Argument. Ever.

But they have merely succeeded in rendering their own argument very doubtful, for in the attempt to link Asser's list with that of Luke, they are compelled to conclude that in this case the Saxons were fraudulently trying to pass themselves off as Semites! Now, there are admittedly phases of Germanic history that are vague. But to suggest that there ever was a time when the Germanic races of all people wished to propagate the view that they were Semitic is truly extraordinary. Anti-Semitism has been an inherent feature of Germanic cuhure [sic] since time immemorial (it was by no means the invention of the Nazis), and to accept such a proposal we would have to fly in the face of all that we know about Saxon and Germanic culture.

And that, my friends, is the dumbest fucking thing I’ve read so far in this vast collection of dumb fucking dumbitude.

I mean, seriously. His entire argument as to why Aethelwulf wouldn’t have wanted to have his name associated with Jesus is because Germans are anti-Semitic.

I personally, can think of many reasons why someone would want his name associated with Jesus. I can also think of many reasons why the Anglo-Saxons wouldn’t have been particularly anti-Semitic. Mostly because back when they were conquering England they were a bunch of pagans who probably didn’t know what a Jew was and didn’t care, anyway.

The real problem that I’m having with this, though, is that no matter how much I try to wrap my mind around this whole argument, I can’t answer one simple question.

Why does it matter? Basically, I can’t imagine why Cooper would bring Magoun and world-renowned economist James Maynard Keynes in to this at all. All he’s really doing is adding an alternate explanation for his stupidity. And as he’s already asked us to simply believe that the story of Brutus of Troy, the Aeneid, and the Illiad were all completely factual historical accounts of history and not epic poetry, I’m reasonably certain that there’s no need to establish the idea that he’s an actual historian who actually tries…

So, really, all he’s doing here is introducing hypotheses that can only cause people to question his central point. Not even necessarily the trying to tie Aethelwulf to Jesus thing. Just the idea that maybe they were making shit up for their own ends. That seems like a bad move, given that Cooper obviously isn’t a big fan of being questioned. And he lacks intellectual honesty, also. Too.

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[1]Yeah. There’s a fun story. My happy little laptop came with Windows Vista, as I got it after XP stopped being, y’know, sold. It was with more than a little trepidation that I fired up Vista. But over the last year and a half I’d actually come to rather like it. It was certainly better than XP.

Labor Day weekend I got back from Chicago and there was something weird going on when I booted it. None of the fixes I could find seemed to do anything, so I talked it over with Big A, who is my go-to computer guy. He mucked about a bit, then came to the conclusion that Microsoft hadn’t properly checked an update and it’d be fixed in the next update.

When the next update rolled around my computer refused to actually run the update. At that point the suggestion was to run system recovery, which took a while since I had no clue where the discs were. I let it slide. Then Civ V came out. DirectX 11 did not play nice with my ancient Vista video driver.

So I finally found the recovery discs, which did nothing whatsoever. That led to a quick trip to the Fry’s and about two and a half hours later I had Windows 7. I like it. But I hadn’t exactly been planning on spending that $120 plus tax. So my joke was that Civ V actually cost me $180.

[2]VorJack kindly offered to track some stuff down if it was absolutely necessary. Thing is, I really don’t think it is. Cooper manages to shit his own bed just fine. My main curiosity in trying to read Magoun is that I didn’t know if Magoun was a reliable source or if this was the Biblical descent genealogy equivalent of a Pre-Trib Rapture believer taking potshots at Post-Trib Rapture theorists. So, in short, thanks VorJack. But don’t go out of your way on my behalf…

[3]Again, this is why context fucking matters. You do yourself no favors in debate by taking things out of context and setting strawmen ablaze. This entry is, in fact, an exercise in backing up and saying, “Whoops, I read that wrong last time.”

[4]Veronica Mars is a deeply fascinating program to me. For one thing, it’s got Kristen Bell. For another, it’s got Enrico Colantoni. For a third, it’s got a not-inconsequential amount of Charisma Carpenter. It’s also a show that was extremely well conceived and written with sparkling dialogue. But outside of Bell, Colantoni, and a couple other people the lines are delivered by actors who are so sub-par at best that it completely destroys any attempt to be immersive. Everyone basically delivers their lines like they’re reading them off the cue cards.

09/27/2010

Well, as it turns out, Civilization V has been released. And, as it turns out, I am a massive pile of geekiness. At the time I would have been writing AtF I was, instead, sending my armies of modern armor and mechanized infantry (and a random unit of lancer cavalry because, y'know, they were there...) in to the heart of the Songhai Empire under the cover of F-22 fighters, B-17 bombers, and off-shore artillery support from battleships and destroyers.

They were defending with Renaissance-era riflemen and cannon. Also, their main cavalry was, well, knights.

I love the Civilization games. The historical anachronism is just awesome. And, for the record, Civ V is, by far, the best of the lot. Cities can actually defend themselves even if ungarrisoned and bombard attacking forces. Once you get the right technology your land units can transport themselves across water. Units can't be stacked, which is kind of annoying from a logistics standpoint, but quite nice from a strategic standpoint. Also, unlike past iterations of the game, if you have an advanced unit that is not on the verge of death and your opponent has a relatively crappy unit, there's basically no chance of you losing that battle. That was always one of the -- shall we say -- flavorful aspects of Civ. You'd occasionally find yourself running a tank in to a unit of spearmen and watching the tank lose, leading to a grand WTF? moment. Oh, and the computer will actually tell you whether an attack is a good idea or not before you make it using a little graph of expected damage per side.

As best I can tell, most pre-gunpowder units cannot deal with post-gunpowder units one-on-one. Pre-modern forces cannot handle modern, armored units on-on-one, either. I had one situation where I had a pair of mechanized infantry units pushing forward with two units of riflemen entrenched in the mountains. That was the only time in my fight against the Songhai Empire where I actually stood a chance of losing. So I just bombed the units in to Bolivian...

Also, they introduced something completely new: City-States. Well, these are new for the Civ series. They're kind of analogous to certain factions in Empire: Total War. Basically, though, they're non-expansionist factions that can be a real nuisance in times of war, as they'll go to war on behalf of the large faction they're allied with. So the trick is to find a city-state that's close to a prospective enemy, buy them off, then watch them force your enemy in to a two-front war.

You can also use them as staging areas and flimsy pretexts for wars against major powers. Hilariously, too, if an enemy power invades a City-State that's your protectorate, they'll taunt you about it. This, for the record, might seem like a good idea if the invading power is extremely strong or far away. If it is, however, the weakest major power left on the board and it taunts the most powerful force...

And so but anyway, that was my day yesterday.

Oddly enough, it was roughly as historically accurate as After the Flood. And a shit-ton more exciting.

Also, I'll be doing a lot of traveling over the course of October. So there might be a couple more of these weeks in the near future.

09/12/2010

So when I last left offAfter the Flood I was writing about Sutton Hoo and Raedwald. I was also writing on a different blog address. But those two things are completely unrelated.

Either way, we’re going to pick up where I left off. With Wuffa.

Now Wuffa was not the first king of East Anglia. That honour normally goes to his father Wehh, or Wehha, who reigned in the early 6th century, and for lack of record we are left to wonder what otherwise distinguished Wuffa from his father for him to be regarded with such distinction that all his descendants named themselves after him rather than after his father, who was, after all, the very founder of the royal line of the East Anglian kings.

Wuffa, of course, was not the only Saxon to found a clan. Sceldwea, otherwise known as Scyld (pronounced 'shield') founded the Scyldingas. Geat, (pronounced 'geet' or likewise founded the Geatingas. Beowulf of epic fame (see chapter 12) was a Geating, and Geat himself was inevitably given a place in the Saxons' ancestral pantheon. Nennius tells us that he was one of the false gods whom the pagan Saxons worshipped, and we read the same in Assher and other sources.

As I said, I talked about Wuffa before. There’s an exceedingly good chance that the name of this “king” was actually a memory of the fact that at least some of the people who founded East Anglia were descendents of a Swedish clan known as the Wolf Clan. This is a slightly different story than the one where there was a Saxon named Wuffa. I’ve already talked about that one at length, though. I’m more interested in the fellow named Geat.

Wuffa is, as much as anything, a theory. There’s a guy in the genealogy named Wuffa and there’s a Swedish clan with a similar name. It’s rather circumstantial. But it’s also probable. Still, it’s nothing like the guy named Geat. Why?

There was a people group known as the Geats. I’ll say it again. Let it sink in. We know there was a freaking people group up in Scandinavia known as the Geats. There’s a non-zero chance, in fact, that the Jutes were descended from the Geats. Or possibly the other way around, but I’m pretty sure that the Geats came first.

Either way, considering the fact that the foundation of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in England was a crazy mish-mash of Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, it would make perfect sense that there would be a “Geat” somewhere as an eponymous foundational figure in the Anglo-Saxon genealogies.

Honestly, this is not that difficult. All you have to do is just the tiniest bit of research. And by “research” I don’t mean, “Try to find something that supports your stupid hypothesis, then look up all the terms you can use to decry those evil modernists who disagree with you.

But that might be too much to ask. At least, we’ve learned that this is too much to ask time and time again. So I’m seriously considering giving up on asking…

Anyway, Cooper then decides to make the leap over to Ethelbert and discuss the Gewisse.

Gewis founded the clan of the Gewissae who later settled in the west of England, and in the charters that have survived, the kings of Wessex are each styled Rex Gewissorum. However, when Alfred of Wessex translated into Old English Bede's Historia Ecclesiasticae, he suppressed the title Rex Gewissorum, and his reason for doing this was undoubtedly the blatantly pagan connotations of the name. Alfred himself, as a supposedly good and Christian king, wanted no such association of his name with that of Gewis. It would have had the same uncomfortable sound as styling himself king of the children of Woden, and this would have been anathema both to himself and to his Christian clerical ministers.

This I find to be, well, odd. We mostly have the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle to tell us about the life of Alfred the Great. To the best of my knowledge, it has no problems referencing the Gewisse. Of course it does that because, in the tradition of good Medieval history, the book was created from a crapload of different sources.[1] There were at least five primary sources[2] used, and who knows how many additional sources went in to those.

It does, however, lead to directly to the next point. Well, “directly” in ways that only make sense if you’ve been following Cooper’s “logic” for long enough.

And yet, and here we come to the significant point, in his own authorised biography (i.e. Asser's Life of Alfred), which Alfred himself undoubtedly oversaw with great care, the name of Gewis is allowed to stand proud as one of Alfred's ancestors! Alfred, whilst willing enough to drop for himself the hitherto royal but pagan title of Rex Gewissorum, was clearly not prepared to expunge the name of Gewis from the royal line, simply because the royal genealogies were themselves sacrosanct and inviolable.

This is his constant argument. It’s a stupid, circular argument, the sort that makes me want to bang my head against the nearest hard, flat surface. The genealogies weren’t changed because the genealogies weren’t allowed to be changed. It’s a tautology, and a dumb one at that. It ignores the possibility that it wasn’t a rule in the first place. It ignores the possibility that it became a rule somewhere down the road after a bad genealogy was created. It ignores the possibility that mistakes of an honest nature were made somewhere in the murky past. The whole idea is, in a word, frustrating.

And it all builds up to this argument:

And this should be carefully considered before any further assurance is given that these royal genealogies were freely tampered with, an allegation that has been made and repeated in countless modernist works on the subject.

Goddamn modernists, what with their insistence on figuring out whether or not people from the past were just pulling stuff out of their asses. It’s tiresome, that’s what it is. I’m tired of Cooper’s stupidity.

The next bit, though, is actually causing me physical pain to contemplate at the moment. Honestly, it’s just that fucking stupid. It’s wear a goddamn helmet because you’re going to run in to something stupid.

So I’ll leave it until next week. I had a headache going in to this and this really isn’t helping…

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[1]And, yes, “crapload” is a specific historical term. It’s somewhat larger than a “buttload,” but smaller than a “ginormous shitload.” Consider this your lesson for the day.

[2]I use “primary sources” here incorrectly. A primary source is one that is regarded as being from a direct witness. In this case I use the term to refer to that which the writers of the Chronicle would have primarily used. Which would technically make them secondary sources. My goal, as always, is to leave everyone hopelessly confused.